This workshop is organized by the project Causality in language and cognition (with the support of the Fédération Typologie et Universaux Linguistiques), which is dedicated to understanding the cross-linguistic expression of causality in a range of linguistic structures. Although causality plays a role in many facets of language - for example, in argument structure, aspect, and modality - it has not received a dedicated, coherent treatment in formal linguistics in a way that is compatible with work in cognition. Almost without exception, formal approaches have relied on counterfactual theories of causation (notably that of David Lewis), without further investigating how the expression of causality in language might have a cognitive basis, as shown by insights about force transmission in cognitive linguistics (e.g. Talmy, 1988, 2000; Croft, in press), as well as by research on language processing (Wolff, 2007; Wolff et al., 2010), language acquisition (e.g. Bowerman & Choi, 2001; Choi, 2009; Choi & Bowerman, 1991), or infant cognition (e.g. Lécuyer, 1989; Leslie, 1984, 1994; Spelke, 1998; Spelke & Kinzler, 2007; Spelke et al., 1992; Lécuyer, 1989; Mandler, 1998, 2008, 2012).

The project brings together linguists and psycholinguists aiming to develop a framework that takes all of these lines of research into account in order to understand how cognitively realistic concepts of causality are combined in language. The present workshop will focus particularly on prelinguistic and early linguistic notions of causality in infants.